Marketing Panes - Marketing Interviews & Tips for Window Treatment and Awning Companies

Guest Profile: Ceil DiGuglielmo Ceil DiGuglielmo is the owner of The Curtains and Soft Furnishings Resource Library, the industry’s largest collection of educational resources for Custom Home Furnishings Professionals. She is also the owner of Learn to Choose Window Coverings an online course for window treatment professionals created by Linda Erlam.Ceil has owned a to the trade workroom since 2005. Ceil is passionate about education and technology in the window coverings and soft home furnishings industry. She has taught at the Custom Workroom Conference and has done presentations for several Window Coverings Association of America chapters. Ceil is the producer and Host of The Sew Much More Podcast, an interview-style podcast sharing the stories of the people in the custom home furnishings industry. Ceil also produces and co-hosts 30 Minutes with Workroom Tech with Susan Woodcock, offering workroom education. Other Notes/Links: Websites: The Sew Much More Podcast The Curtains and Soft Furnishings Resource Library Learn to Choose Window Coverings pssst…. want to be a guest on the show? Listen to other episodes Subscribe to Marketing Panes for more expert insights, strategies, and real stories from across the window treatment and awning industry. Spotify: https://bit.ly/4j20C49 ApplePodcast: https://bit.ly/4c2VN8s Video https://youtu.be/Fb98Tcf4LtQ Click here to display Transcript TRANSCRIPT William Hanke (00:00) Welcome back to Marketing Panes where we talk with real window treatment professionals, business owners and service providers about what’s working in marketing and what’s changing in the industry. Today’s guest is Ceil DiGuglielmo a longtime workroom pro turned educator and the current steward of the Curtains and Soft Furnishings Resource Library. one of the most comprehensive collections of training and tools in the industry. She spent years helping fabricators and designers not only level up their skills, but build confidence and community along the way. We’ll talk about. what today’s workroom professionals need most, what’s shifting and how people learn the trade, and why education and support can’t be one size fits all. Let’s get into it. Ceil, first of all, thank you so much for being on the show today. Ceil (00:55) Well, thank you. It’s my pleasure. William Hanke (00:58) Glad to have you on. ⁓ How did you first get into this industry? Ceil (01:04) Well, it’s interesting. Well, I think especially for people my age who are in the industry, it started out as I chose to stay home when my oldest daughter was born. And a few months into that, I was like, this isn’t quite what I expected. And I also needed to make some more money. And I had some skills. I knew how to sell. My very first business was making bridal headpieces. And I literally would make a headpiece, photograph it, take it apart, make another headpiece, actually, my husband photographed He was a photographer at the time. And I put together a book and then I started advertising locally. And I did that for a couple years, but I had been in business. I worked for a retail, large retailer in the Philadelphia area. I just did not know how to run a business. And I ended up going to a SCORE meeting for female entrepreneurs. And they are the service core of retired executives if people don’t know who they are. William Hanke (01:57) Okay. Ceil (02:02) It was eye-opening and I learned a lot about how to run my business. I got myself a score mentor and I met two interior designers there who were looking for someone to make soft furnishings and window treatments for them. And it was like the perfect alignment. ⁓ I was able to work with them. And since they were new, I could say to them, I have no idea how to make that, but I will find out. And it was, I wasn’t embarrassed or trying to prove myself. They were new. There were things they didn’t know. So it was a great start. And then I sort of fell into, I found out about other people in the industry through a conference that was advertised. And I went. William Hanke (02:34) Yeah. Ceil (02:46) and I sat down in my first class and it was like, ⁓ these are my people. Like this is what I want to be doing. And I realized it was in fact a business that fabricating window treatments could be a career for me. And it could be something I could work around my family schedule when I needed to and grow it as my family grew. William Hanke (02:59) Yeah. Yeah, I love that you say this could be a business. I remember that as well. Like, ⁓ I could probably do this. This could be a thing, right? Yeah, that’s awesome. So you’ve worked in several corners of the trade now. What experiences shaped that approach? Ceil (03:20) Yes, it’s gonna be a thing. Well, we talk a lot about learning to say no, but it’s also important to say yes. And I said yes to a lot of odd things. And one of the things that I said yes to was doing my own podcast. I had been listening to a podcast that was actually meant for crafters. And I say this very respectfully, I’m really not a crafter. William Hanke (03:58) Sure. Ceil (03:59) I need to make something that has a purpose. I mean, I knit and I do some other things, but I never really saw myself as a crafter and I don’t, can’t tell you why I used to listen to this podcast, except that the woman who did it did such a brilliant job of asking questions. Her name is Abby Glassenberg. And I kept listening to it and thinking, oh, somebody in our industry should do this. William Hanke (04:10) you Ceil (04:24) somebody in our industry should do this. And then one day I figured like, well, I’m somebody and I can go to YouTube and figure out how to run, you know, do a podcast. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. As you well know, there was a whole lot more to it. But I said yes to it. I started to do it. And then when Janelle Deck, who was a previous owner of the Curtains and Soft Furnishings Resource Library was William Hanke (04:38) Sure. Ceil (04:52) realizing it no longer connected to what she was trying to build. She and I sat down and talked about it and actually the anniversary is coming up very soon. On January 17th of 2017, we signed the papers and I took over running the Curtains and Soft Furnishings Resource Library. William Hanke (05:12) Wow. Wow. Ceil (05:14) So again, I said yes, but I didn’t quite know everything I was getting myself into. But I had been a member of the library and I understood what having a place to go to and look for information, but also having a community. At that point, Facebook groups were becoming very popular, but sometimes I’d look and there’d be like 3000 members on a Facebook group. And I had no way of knowing whether they were professionals or whether the questions that were being answered were the best way to do things or the most recognized. right way. I know there’s no one right way to do everything, but I would get too many answers for things. Inside the library, it’s a smaller group. It is professionals. It’s people who have been helping other people for years. We have some people who are retired from the business and still continue to come into the library and answer questions and help people. So I loved what the library stood for and it was a great ⁓ William Hanke (06:12) Love you. Yeah. Ceil (06:18) It was a great combination of the podcast and the library. I did not realize that I would have so little time and I started to cut back on the fabrication. So in the past maybe two or three years, I’ve cut back to maybe just one or two clients that I work with. And that’s more to keep myself in the workroom once in a while than anything else. So the focus now is on running the library, doing the podcast. And part of the library is also a digital digest, which is a magazine geared towards workrooms. William Hanke (06:45) Yeah. ⁓ that’s awesome. You’ve basically you mentioned score earlier on. You’ve basically built a version of score specifically for this industry, right? Ceil (06:57) Thank You know, I hadn’t thought about that, but yes, based on the fact that so many people within the library are seasoned fabricators and willing to answer questions. the content of the library, Will, it’s grown over the years. Some of it is, William Hanke (07:08) Yeah. Ceil (07:26) Recorded webinars from the old custom home furnishings Academy some of it is courses that people put together sold for a little while and then realized that the content was important but not as Up to date so they would donate it to the library and also have a great working relationship with the workroom channel and a lot of our industry teachers record courses on there. So yeah, yeah, you’re right. I had not thought about that, but it is kind of like score for window treatment fabricators. William Hanke (07:59) Yeah, yeah. And for listeners that aren’t familiar with score, we’ll put a link in the show notes for sure, because I used score when I first got started. What an amazing organization to really, you I love to hear success stories like yours, where you had a mentor that helped you just, you know, just explain that, yes, this can be a thing. And this is the way to get there. Ceil (08:08) Okay. And what I loved about ScoreWill was that it was people with, at one point I had one mentor and then for a little while I was meeting with two or three people. During the pandemic, we were only meeting on Zoom. So ⁓ like three of them would jump on and they would give me different perspectives from their industries. So it was just, and just really helped me keep on task about running the business end of things. William Hanke (08:43) Yeah. Ceil (08:50) not just being creative and this is pretty, I want to make this. I really had to focus on that part of it too. William Hanke (08:51) Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Creat